The Sleepover

At ten to two on Thanksgiving morning, four houses down from the Whitmore place on Starfighter Lane, a beige sedan sat with its engine off and its left taillight flickering anyway, which was more activity than anything else on the street could claim.

Agent Dale Raymond Buckley of the Homeland Extraterrestrial Division sat inside it in his trench coat. His sunglasses were pushed up onto his forehead, because it was night and even he had limits. The raccoon sat on the dashboard. The driver’s window was cracked two inches for her, which let the cold in and let nothing out, since the car had long ago stopped smelling of anything but Buckley and the raccoon had long ago stopped minding.

After the raid he had moved from directly across the street to four houses down, on the principle that a man who has been seen should be seen less. The principle had not been tested. Nobody on Starfighter Lane had looked at the sedan in a week, and one resident had begun putting her recycling out beside it.

In the lighter socket a new phone charger glowed a small, steady green. He had bought it at the Fuel Depot at 22:14 for fifteen dollars, and its light was the only green on Starfighter Lane he could explain.

He lifted the phone to his mouth.

“Test. Test.” He waited. The screen stayed on. For three weeks it had not. “Phone operational. Morale: operational.”

The raccoon looked at him. He had found that she looked at him most when he was most correct.

“Zero-one-fifty,” he told the phone. “Garage dark. Subject presumably asleep.”

The garage four houses up was a two-car garage with a roll-up door and one side window, attached to a split-level exactly like the split-levels on either side of it, and it was, at ten to two, the least interesting building in Ohio. The porch light beside it flickered at a different rate from his taillight. He had timed both.

“Do they sleep?”

He had never considered it. In fourteen days of surveillance and one very long month before that, he had considered the subject’s height, its diet, its transmission frequency and its apparent fondness for lawn ornaments, and not once whether it closed its eyes. He took the gas-station notebook off the seat and wrote Do they sleep? with the tiny pencil, which had cost thirty-nine cents and was in the ledger, and he underlined it twice.

Then, because protocol was protocol, he wrote the date the way H-ED required it. The agency assigned an overnight stake-out to the calendar day on which it began, so that no agent could claim two days’ per diem for one night’s sitting, and H-ED had not paid a per diem to anybody since the early nineties. It was therefore not Thursday. It was Surveillance Day fourteen, night portion. He wrote that down too, and underlined nothing, because it was not a question.

The signal detector lay on the passenger seat, where a partner would have sat if H-ED issued partners. It was a receiver, a coat hanger and a great deal of duct tape, and for a week it had had nothing to say. Its needle lay against the left-hand pin like a dog that has been told to stay and has decided to make a career of it. He had begun to take this personally.

He hummed four notes under his breath, the ones he had hummed on every stake-out since the academy, which in his head came with strings. The garage did not respond to them.

Nothing happened. A timer switched off a porch light across the street. A leaf moved on the lawn and lay down again. Far away on Route 9 a truck changed gear on its way to somewhere else. Buckley, who had come prepared for anything, found that he was almost disappointed, and that it was a very long way to morning.

He set the phone’s alarm for 02:28. A round number would have been predictable, and he had not survived eleven years at H-ED by doing what anybody expected of him, which was also, almost word for word, the complaint in his last three reviews.

He settled into the seat. He folded his arms over the notebook and let his head go back against the rest.

“Wake me if anything happens, Deputy Director.”

At six minutes to two his eyes closed.

At six minutes to two, four houses up, a single pulse of green showed under Sam Whitmore’s garage door, a line of light as long as the door and no thicker than a ruler, laid along the concrete of the driveway, and was gone as soon as it came.

Buckley did not see it. The raccoon, who had been asked to wake him if anything happened, saw it.

The raccoon did not.